Despite the upward trend of Greece’s Digital Maturity Index, based on the data of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV), Greece must make a leap in order to stay on the track of the Digital Decade, reach the goals that Europe has set for the year 2030, and reap the benefits.
According to the key indicators of the EU’s Digital Decade published by the European Commission, a European policy program for digital transformation in Europe with explicit objectives for 2030, Greece is lagging behind the rest of the EU. Therefore, it still needs to do a lot to converge with the EU-27 average. Starting from a particularly low point, Greece is gradually approaching the European average performance in the basic digital skills of the population, the development of 5G networks, the digitization of public services and network penetration. But it is significantly lacking in the implementation of private investment in cutting-edge technologies, as well as in cutting-edge ICT skills and in individual sectors of the ICT footprint in the national economy.
Suggestions
SEV has made concrete proposals for how this leap can be achieved.
It mainly focuses on incentives to accelerate the penetration of very high speed broadband networks, horizontal campaigns to strengthen the digital literacy of the population, doubling the number of graduates in ICT schools, shaping more flexible financing tools and tax incentives for innovation and ICT. In addition, it focuses on the preparation of modern national strategies and frameworks for the safe development and productive use of cutting-edge technologies and applications, formation of an operational framework for the governance and openness of public data, preparation of programmatic agreements (Sector Deals) with the domestic ICT sector, simplification of procedures before digitization, acceleration of public administration digital transformation projects.
Goals and achievements
The objectives of the Digital Decade are four – skills, infrastructure, business and public services. The main objective concerns all households and has to do with their access to very high-capacity networks. Moreover, 80% of the population needs to have basic digital skills, 20 million skilled workers in Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) to work in the European Union, 75% of businesses using some advanced technology (cloud, big data, artificial intelligence), 90% of small and medium-sized businesses having achieved the basic level of digital maturity and all public services to be provided digitally.
